Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

Some Rare Self-Examination

So I was planning on doing temple runs with my guild and the question was put to me, “How much money do you make?” And I realized after all this time that I don’t actually know. While I know it is a good way to get ectos other assorted materials, I hadn’t thought much about what I actually get out of it. There are plenty of ways to make money in Guild Wars 2, are Temple Runs one of them?

So tonight I monitored how much silver I made total from selling all grey material, blues and greens. I salvaged my cloth, didn’t deposit any collectibles, left my rares temporarily unsalvaged, didn’t open my Gilded Coffers or Heavy Moldy Bags.

We did Melandru first, but I missed the precious 2nd beacon farm event, which likely would have increased my profits. Followed by Lyssa, from which little drops to begin with, but again we didn’t have to do pre-events, she was already in progress. Then Eye of Zhaitan after which we proceeded to the northern invasion pre-events for Balthazar. Following that, Arah (post Warmaster Chan event which is still crazy broken due to scaling) then the Priest of Grenth and its subsequent chest event. Followed by the final event at Dwayna, unfortunately missing the Historian Vermoth champ farming event. This took about an hour and a half, which is around average these days.

I did all this with a good amount of Magic Find. Food up at all times, a booster for the first hour, a banner for the majority of the events and guild buff as well, so I probably had close to 275% at times but around 225% magic for the rest.

I made about 1g20s from the grey, blues and green, and the event rewards.

I only received 4 T6 trophy materials, which is the big disappointment for me. I mean come on, no wonder the prices for these are so out of control if I can spend an hour and a half playing with an insane amount of magic find in the toughest area in the game and only get 4 of them. Profit would be 1.57g minus taxes.

I also picked up 26 T5 trophies, 8 of which were incandescent dust. This works out to about 74s.

I salvaged about 36 silk scraps, which works out to around 82s.

I looted 16 rares. If I were to simply sell these on the auction house that would equal, before taxes, approximately 8.78g. I’m going to salvage these however and get 11 ectos worth just over 4g, along with other materials worth around 60s.

I’ll also open the 27 Heavy Moldy Bags, and 6 Large Moldy Bags. This works out to about 1.6g in materials before taxes on the AH. Unfortunately I again received a paltry amount of T6, one Vial of Powerful Blood.

Opening 16 champ boxes gives me just 2 more T6. Ugh. But adding up everything I sell, T5, silk, gossamer, greens, and other items comes to about 2.2g before taxes.

Now keep in mind I’ve been rounding numbers up and down to make the numbers easier to read and deal with, and I’m not even interested in a scientific result here, just a big ballpark figure, but I came out around 14 or 15g ahead of the game after taxes, if I had sold the rares instead of salvaging them. It’s much closer to 10g with salvaged rares. That’s also keeping in mind that I would have had to sell everything, and not keep the silk, the gossamer, the T6, the T5, or anything else. If I do keep those materials, I come out with very little gold overall but plenty in materials.

Unknown Unknowns

I was talking with my good friend Spirit, found on Twitter and the Relics of Orr podcast and she happened to mention something offhand about the living world team. She had said the size of the team was actually only about 20 people. I immediately waterboarded her for more information and she provided a link.

I am just one small member on a very large team that creates the Living World content. Our team changes in size, but there are just a little over twenty people on it at any given time. This includes artists, designers, QA people, project managers, audio engineers, composers, leadership, programmers, and writers. The Living World is very much a team effort. We have a series of meetings as we’re developing each release that start big picture and gradually hone in on exactly what we want to do. We all have our areas of expertise that we bring to the table, but everyone is invited to give opinions and ideas.

My responsibility as narrative designer for the team is to keep the lore in check, to ensure the dialogue for the iconic characters is in voice, and to guide us through the overarching storyline, so that each release keeps us moving toward our final story goals.

We’ve made a lot of changes for Season 2. We’re continually improving our processes with each new release. The most notable being that we no longer have 4 Living World teams, each making their own content; we have 1. This has allowed us to create much more cohesive releases, and I think you’ll find that our story hangs together quite well in Season 2.

Now I guess I missed this when it was first posted a month ago, or I completely forgot about it, but I thought it was worth drawing attention to. A little over 20 people, to me, is a very impressive number of people for the amount of content they’re pushing out, especially when Angel goes on to stipulate the depth of the team right down to Quality Assurance.

Not to mention the fact that there is now one living story team and not four. Which certainly seems to explain a great deal of the much stronger narrative direction.

But what I guess is most intriguing to me is that Arenanet employs something like 300 people.

What are the other 250ish people working on exactly? I mean we have information on upcoming features up until about September 9th. Beyond that we can guess at 3 things. Halloween, Wintersday, and the remaining episodes of season 2. And all of that just follows from logic, not any actual information. And will the living story team handle Halloween and Wintersday or is that worked on by other teams?

I get the feeling that a little of the ill will towards Arenanet recently stems from a lack of long term information. Yet they’re obviously working on… something? I think they’ve even said as much in vague comments here and there. That’s not going to satisfy the average MMO player unfortunately.

People want long term goals to work towards. That ranges from in game goals like precursors and stacks of ectos to out of game goals like expansion rainbows and unicorn mounts on the horizon.

In Which I Get Cranky With Matt Wuerffel and Devon Carver: Part 1

A lot of the lateral progression for players of Guild Wars 2 revolves around skins. I certainly spend a great deal of time collecting skins even if I don’t change my look very much. Many of the skins are collected through dungeon repetition but many are available only through gold or karma. After two years that’s become quite an annoyance. Gold farming and karma training should be the playstyle of bots, not players.

The most egregious example of gold required to get the skin you want is the precursor. Over the past several months, since the wardrobe allowed players to skin non-legendary weapons with legendary skins, the price of precursor weapons has skyrocketed. The chaos gun, precursor to quip, that I bought a year and a half ago is now 4x the price I paid. Approximately 200g then, it is around 800g now. All for a not particularly sought after Legendary weapon.

I’ve been hearing a lot, and for a long time, from people who spend a lot of time on these types of goals that the economy is broken and that inflation is out of control. While there are clearly problems, I don’t agree. The economy works. In fact it works better than it did in the first months after launch. I can sell virtually anything for a profit. I’ve seen dead economies in MMOs and they don’t work like that. Either you can’t afford anything or you can afford everything.

Guild Wars 2’s economy is fine, except for when it comes to precursors, at which point it is kind of nuts. Not just the precursors but a lot of the components for building a legendary are high priced and require a lot of gold generation.

So I guess I was pretty disappointed to see in the GuildMag interview that once again precursor crafting is so far away that they’re using the term “soon” to describe when it’s coming.

Somewhere along the way Arenanet has gotten the idea that gold generation is content. That players spending loads of time doing nothing but repeating content, farming mobs, doing whatever is the most efficient way to make gold is acceptable. Guild Wars 2 is not a grind they say, you don’t have to have good skins to play they say. If you make your lateral progression about skins, and then make the only way to get lots of skins through gold, and the only way to get lots of gold is through grinding, then you’ve got yourself a bit of a conundrum. I thought long and hard about a polite way to end that sentence. Conundrum.

Building legendary weapons should be epic and take a lot of work, yes. Fine with it. It should even cost a lot of gold, that’s cool too. But I don’t think there’s a single person playing the game who is satisfied with where things sit.

Arenanet clearly has an idea of complex crafting recipes, such as with the current backpiece (enough with the backpieces already) recipes. I don’t know what the big hold up is. Even before I bought chaos gun, precursor prices were a problem. Yet it seems like nothing has been done in all this time.

After two years, sometimes “soon” isn’t good enough.

Whether Weather

One of the things I have enjoyed most about the new zone, Dry Top, is the weather effects. Sandstorms are immersive and beautiful. Overcoming creatures in MMOs is part of the adventure but rarely do we get to overcome our environment. When we do encounter terrain that fights back, it is usually over small areas, undead arms and tendrils coming out of the ground, short-term AoE effects that knock you down or light you on fire, debuffs in small areas you can avoid. Sandstorms are huge and less about being physically imposing and more about being visually stunning, mentally wondrous.

Overall Dry Top is now one of my favourite zones in the game. I couldn’t help but wish there had been more effects like the sandstorms in the game from the start. One of the first reactions I think everyone had was, now that we have sandstorms, lets have snowstorms! Which is a great idea, and one that I encourage, but can’t we do better? Just slapping a new skin on sandstorms doesn’t really prod me creatively. I’d like to have snowstorms (they already exist in the Snowblind fractal) rainstorms, and everything that comes with those weather events, but I want to go further.

So I tried brainstorming a few ideas.

The first thing I came up with was fog. Not exactly as harrowing as a storm, but ominous and potentially creepy. What if we made it so thick that it was much like one of the dark rooms in the game, or varied between a light fog and a thick bank of it. But just making things dark wouldn’t be any good, so we have lights, giant fog lights that are lit up by events. I’d love for this fog zone to take place in a very wet, very maritime setting, with fog horns, and rain gear. And are there consequences for letting things get too foggy? Is the terrain hard to navigate in the dark, do creatures come out only in the fog? If we force all the fog back to its source, what spawns?

Another environment might be blistering heat where the only escape is into the shade. I think of this as being kind of like the floor is lava, jumping from one shaded area to the next. Creatures might have pulls that drag you into the sun, or some other continual heat source.

I guess this one is shooting for the moon but in a scenario where we have rainstorms with thunder, lightning, and blinding rain, why not have floods as well? Probably impossible to implement but Guild Wars 2 does have an extensive underwater mechanic (that I personally like despite the opinionis of many) that could play well in this environment. A landscape that is normally dry is hit with a rainstorm effect, and then filled with water and completely different objectives and events?

The quicksand river in Dry Top is interesting and I’d like to see more done with it aside from a simple barrier that you have to cross. Maybe a jumping puzzle that concentrates less on dying from height and more from dying in quicksand. Or an event in a wide-spread area that gives immunity to the quicksand as long as you can maintain a buff or complete events. And aside from quicksand you could apply a similar mechanic to white water rapids.

Most of all I think I’d like to see these ideas, and the sandstorms, blizzards, and hurricanes in the context of a world boss. Imagine light pushing fog back into a specific area until it is a concentrated mass of… something. Or dust and sand so thick you can barely see to fight.

I think weather has a lot of potential in MMOs that is hardly ever touched on in a meaningful way. Light rain that you barely notice, snow falling as if it’s barely there. Back in my day we had to trudge through 2 feet of snow in temperatures 20 below 0 uphill both ways! How come MMOs are easier than that?

Rare Beasts of Tyria

Here we find an agressive male plated behemoth, it’s teeth specifically designed for ripping out the jugular of its prey with powerful jaws.

A while back I had the idea to write about the unsung monsters of Tyria. The beasts that are shunted to the side, ignored, and unremarked upon. It gets a little tiresome killing the same monsters over and over again. So I thought why not point out some of the creatures that we rarely see and hope to see in the future?

Dry Top reminded me of my original idea. The colocal was one of the creatures I had thought to fight more of. Although it is obviously griffon, they had previously been only seen in just a few areas of Harathi Hinterlands. Even so, their appearance is unique, and I was happy to see them in Dry Top. Even if they don’t appear to have any particular skills, aside from the Colocal Queen.

And now there are rumours of a giant. Curses! I should have thought of that one. They can be found in Diessa Plateau, Hirathi Highlands, and Brisban, while peaceful giants can be found elsewhere. There are very few hostile giants in the traveled lands of Tyria and to date I’ve killed but 13 of them.

But there are other beasts.

There is the Cavern Scutter. A very alien crab/face-hugger looking creature. It’s typically very small but there isn’t a single veteran or champion of its kind. They’re only found in very rocky areas in Brisban, Mount Maelstrom, Genderren Fields and Bloodtide Coast, and typically in very small numbers. I’m hoping to discover these lurking in a cave or dark canyon in Dry Top.

The penipal is also quite rare. A cross between a manatee, a sea lion, and a quaggan, I actually doubt most people would recognize this creature if they came upon it. It has a pretty specific habitat, near frozen water in the shiverpeaks, so unless there is a desert species I would imagine we won’t be seeing the pinipal any time soon.

I’ve also seen very little of the Plated Behemoth. I can count on my fingers how many times I’ve actually fought one, they are typically neutral. I rarely attack such timid creatures. They’re a sort of rhinocerous looking thing. Again I’ve not seen them in large numbers or as veterans or champions. This one in particular might fit a desert landscape.

If I look through my records I can see that two types of creatures stand out in their obscurity. Hylek and plants, and although I doubt the desert is a good environment for hylek (aside from the brutish female already in zone) and I’ve already predicted plants in Dry Top recently.

Twisted nightmares haven’t been seen anywhere since Scarlet met her end, but I can hardly believe we’ve seen the last of such impressively designed monstrosities. As we’re investigating some of Scarlet’s former haunts, maybe we’ll see more of them, or more steam creatures, which she also took an interest in.

Of course there are new monsters to fight as well. The dust mites in Dry Top, the tentacles that have appeared, I’ve never seen anything like them.

Some monsters are better off rarely appearing of course. When they are elusive, mysterious, it is more interesting. When they do appear it’s special and different. A Karka in another region would certainly take something away from Southsun Cove, though I wouldn’t be disappointed to see more of them.

The New Zone

Guild Wars 2 is getting a new zone. I don’t think Arenanet is being particularly sly with how they’ve hinted at it.

I think Verene has a pretty good idea of the general location of the portal and the new zone in general, but I’m more interested in thinking about what’s going to be in that zone. New mobs? New mechanics? New Jumping puzzle? Plenty of speculation to be had.

I think my feelings can be summed up in a tweet I sent a few months back.

The end of Scarlet pretty much spelled it out anyway. Even if we hadn’t had a graphic representation a power surge that races past asuran settings to awaken a great big eye, we’d have the epilogue scene where Marjory’s sister just happens to be headed out west as well. None too subtle.

As far as my opinions on what will be in a new zone, nothing has really changed since my previous speculative post on new zones.

But with a firmer grasp on a future destination, I’m ready to be slightly more specific (and of course proven wrong within days) and name things.

I think we’ll have new mobs that have been corrupted by Mordremoth. Likely corrupted with an earthy jungle-like theme. Thorns, lots of thorns. For me these creatures will likely be Thorn Stalkers and other plant life forms from the original Guild Wars, both corrupted and uncorrupted. Ibolga, Oakhearts, Tangled Seeds, etc.

Perhaps we’ll also see our first corrupted centaurs, we know that undead centaurs have been considered in the past. Along with more regular centaurs of course.

What I’m most hopeful for are brand new never before seen mobs of some type, similar to the twisted nightmares introduced during the Scarlet Invasions. Arenanet seems to have a talent for designing some pretty incredible mobs so I am prepared to be even more impressed by anything new they come up with.

What I’m most interested in speculating about however are sylvari. Would a dragon that possibly has links to the origins of sylvari have the ability to control them much like it may have controlled Scarlet? Will more sylvari sway under Mordremoth’s influence or even be corrupted? If not the Pale Tree’s sylvari, what about the other sylvari hinted at through Malyck’s storyline or the Nightmare Court? I’d love to see some of these avenues explored.

As I’ve said before, I think the content will generally be of a higher level, with more difficulty, and more complex mob mechanics. Not to mention a lot of opportunities to use all the new finishers they keep putting on the gem store.

As for content, I’m expecting meta events that push across the full length of the zone but I’m hoping for some of the complexity of their more recent world boss changes. Just plain fighting won’t be interesting to me, so I’m hoping for more intricate events.

Obviously the main story will revolve around the B Iconic characters they’ve created, but I think the Pact will play a large role in the zone itself. Events will probably revolve around their research, intelligence, and combat operations in the area.

I’m also expecting a mix of jungles and desert, obviously. I mean it’s the maguuma and the maguuma wastes. The teaser video clearly shows a lot of desert area, which I’ve noted plenty of times on the blog isn’t currently present in Guild Wars 2. Either way, one thing we can count on is that the beauty of it all will be unparallelled in the MMO community.

If I’m hoping for anything else from a new zone, it’s probably making Tyria a more consistent place. Like making one time only recipes and materials available on a more permanent basis. Azurite and watchwork sprockets come to mind. Runes and sigils like Sigil of Generosity or other unaffordable items. Ascended jewelry crafting would be nice, or more ways to get things that you can only get in very specific ways.

Anyway, time will tell. Hopefully this post isn’t just me treading over the same territory once again.

Blog Post Titler

You see that post title? I named this post as that because I think that if Arenanet handed out titles to bloggers and one of those was for naming blog posts, “Blog Post Titler” would be the epic title I’d receive.

With Season 2 of Guild Wars 2’s living story approaching I was talking with my good friend Spirit, lamenting what I feel is a lack of good titles. While there are some to choose from, particularly if you played Guild Wars 1 and have access to them from the Hall of Monuments, I’m just underwhelmed by the blandness and directness of most Guild Wars 2 titles. I’m also a little annoyed that Season 1 of the living story never really took advantage of the opportunity to implement lots more when there was ample content to do so.

If we examine Master Carver that ought to give you an idea of why I’m a little underwhelmed. Easy to get and boring. I have to imagine the person who created it had a wide selection of options that they presented to their boss and bossperson says, “No no no! This is all wrong! If you wear this title people have to KNOW you carved 150 fucking pumpkins!”

There are many others I have a problem with as well, bland and unimaginative. The achievement track titles, respected achiever, acclaimed achiever, was anyone even trying? The Guild Wars achievement track for titles beats these over the head with a heavy moldy bag. Even just taking out the word “achiever” would have improved these titles ten fold. Respected. Acclaimed. Heralded. Three great titles.

I’m not saying there aren’t good titles in Guild Wars 2, there are. I like Applied Jumping, Golden, some of the living story titles, PvP titles, and the WvW titles are a whole other discussion (the length and time to get these are ridiculous last I checked) but I think the majority of titles are really lacking.

They don’t seem like a resource heavy addition to the game, so I have to wonder why we’re getting so few and so many like Apprentice Toymaker and Journeyman Toymaker. Gee, do you think the 3rd Wintersday title will be Master Toymaker?

Titles could be so much fun and reward players for playing the full breadth of the game.

Why isn’t there one for jumping puzzles? I’ve done every single puzzle, have every achievement, but nothing aside from the completely unrelated Super Adventure Box title.

Do you mean to tell me if I manage to kill 1000 giants in Guild Wars 2 I don’t get a title?

We could derive titles from achievement names. As an example lets take Speedy Reader in Ebonhawke or History Buff in Lion’s Arch. Lots of names for achievements could transition well.

We’re practically given titles in the personal story in Guild Wars 2, but we can’t wear them. Hero of Shaemoor, Slayer of Issormir, each race has one of these if I recall correctly.

And each race has tons of terminology and ranks that would work well. They could be attained through a mix of methods. Perhaps if you have unlocked certain Seraph skins, participated in various centaur related meta events, completed Centaur Slayer, and map completed various human zones, you could be given titles related to human lore. Seraph Guard, Seraph Sergeant, or Militia Fighter. This can translate through to the other races as well, Peacemakers, Valiants, Wolfborn (sorta), and Adamant Guard.

If I choose to help the Quaggan in personal story, I could be Little Barracuda, or if I help the Hylek, Champion of the Sun God.

We could refer to our allegiances as well. Iron Legion, Commoner, Synergetics, Raven, Dusk, there’s a few possibilities that could be bestowed on us from character creation. There are also the orders and our rank within the orders. Magister of the Priory, Lightbringer, Warmaster, or Commander of the Pact. How are these not titles!?

Thankfully living story gives us plenty of opportunities to improve, although that was simply not the case in Season One.

So many missed opportunities. We killed Scarlet, and we got Hero of Lion’s Arch, which is decent. But why not reward people who completed more than just the meta? How about Colour Coordinated for those who completed some of the more difficult aspects of the Scarlet fight? How about Whack-a-mole for completing a task during the Molten Facility? Puppeteer for the Marionette meta, Agony Resistant for being a high level in Fractals of the Mists.

I have no idea what to expect in Season 2 in July (well maybe a few guesses) but now is the perfect time to step up your game Arenanet.

First off we’re taking on dragon #2, so lets start with the most bad-ass title Guild Wars 2 could ever have. Dragon Slayer. My vision for that track would be incremental, awarding a new title after killing each dragon, maybe starting with Dragon’s Bane or Zhaitan’s Doom and finally ending with Dragon Slayer, or Savior of Tyria. Optimistic I’m sure.

Since Arenanet has said that future story arcs will be permanent (omfg ty) and achievements will be less about completing the meta achievements (sweeeeet) and more about completing difficult tasks, I’m hoping titles will get the same 2nd look during season 2.

Since I have no knowledge of the upcoming content its impossible to make suggestions. But.

A season 2 long track that incrementally increases with each new story arc would be interesting.

Adding to that, an individual title for each story arc. They don’t have to be rewarded upon completion of something terribly difficult, or monumentally epic. Just a reward acknowledging that yeah, I did that story arc.

But what about rewards for those terribly difficult tasks? You’ve already named the achievement itself, where is the attached title?

My main problem is pretty obvious. They are far too literal and unimaginative.

Miniature Collector. Do you know how I got that title? I think that you do. Why is it Fashion Collector and not Fashionista, Fashion Police, Fashion Diva, Fashion anything but the most boring possible description. Heralded Achiever, does that have something to do with achievements? I don’t know! Geez Arenanet, stop heaping these feelings of epic accomplishment and great effort on me with all these clever and fun titles. Are they all supposed to appeal to every player? Because that’s a recipe for bad times.

Heck, I’m not saying they have to be 100% awesome, just not bare-bones literal interpretations. I would even appreciate some literal or very content specific titles if we had a lot more of them. But we get so few and they are all so generic. Arenanet, is it necessary to be stingy with something that has no effect on the economy, doesn’t clutter up the bank, can’t be used as a currency?

PS: I hereby bestow upon Spirit the title of Blog Post Helper. Nobody gets a better title than me Spirit. Nobody.

Keynesian Economics

Many Guild Wars 2 players, such as myself, rage at the rarity and RNG of the cash shop item, the Black Lion Chest Key. A key when used in conjunction with the plentiful Black Lion Chest often rewards Cash Shop items such as boosters, convenience items, and makeover kits. But the reason many players save a character slot solely for the purpose of recreating new characters over and over to collect a Black Lion Key (rewarded at the end of the first arc of personal story) are Black Lion Claim Tickets.

Black Lion Claim Tickets (or Black Lion Claim Scraps, 10 of which become a Ticket) can be exchanged with an NPC for rare and valuable skins. These skins often cost between 50g to 100g depending on their availability and popularity.

With this post I hope to examine a few of the key steps, key steps I say, key, in farming keys.

Devise a cunning pun or clever key farming name.

This is probably the most important step. Having an unused character slot goes without saying, so your first step should be to spend a few days thinking up a truly terrible key pun or clever reference. My friend CSquirrelRun uses the name Lady Keysmeer, Spirit uses Doctor Legendary as an allusion to her goals and her podcast. I’ve seen names like Qui-Gon Djinn, Keyanu Reeves, Black Eyed Keys, Keybler Elf, and Commander Keyne. This is the level of excellence you should be striving for.

Now perhaps you’ll tire of your key name at some point, or perhaps it will take you some time to settle on a good name. I myself typically use the name Cobblebot, both due to the robotic and repetitive nature of farming keys, and as a slight reference to Oswald Cobblepot, a notorious criminal and reference to the slightly unethical nature of key farming. However I do tire of this name occasionally and just today lazily threw in the name Key Farming is Wrong.

Unfortunately that’s just the sort of name I’d advise against. Names such as Keys Keys Keys, or Getakey, or KeyFarmer, or No More WorldXP Boosters Pls are utterly without merit, creatively bankrupt, and shameful. To the key farming community, I plead with you, we must do better.

Get the Digital Deluxe.

You’ve got to spend money to make money. An old adage that is as true as often as it isn’t. For expert farmers time is a commodity not worth wasting, and instantaneous access to your strategically pimped out and carefully stored level 1 runed up armour pieces and weapon is a must. How will I defeat the human tutorial champion centaur with one hit if I wait until after the tutorial to get my gear? And then an even further delay by traveling to the bank (ha!) in order to get them? Madness.

The 2 week banker golem that comes with the DD is a luxury key farmers can not do without. It’s sent to every new character you make. As well, the Hero’s Band ring is an added bonus that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Look ugly or fantastic.

I think if you’re playing a character that has a life span of about a half hour, you should make a fashion statement. The most permanent thing your character will ever have is it’s armour, so lets grab peoples attention with loud colours and the ugliest armour set you can think of. I use the Heritage set you get from the Hall of Monuments, free to transmute for the cheaper key farmer.

However I do have an extensive number of dungeon tokens from some dungeons, so a Crucible of Eternity dungeon set for my key farmer isn’t out of the question.

Bobblehead Legolas and Ugly Joe go Key Farming

Save time and sanity.

The average run for a key farmer is around 20 to 30 minutes. So the best way to keep yourself from going insane while spending 30 minutes farming up a key that is potentially worthless is to spend that time figuring out how to go faster.

Here’s a few suggestions

– The only choices you need to make in character creation are human, warrior/guardian, and commoner storyline, so if you don’t come out looking like Legolas, you’re doing it wrong.
– Any way you can increase power is great for killing things so get out that little girl’s doll and stuff it down your pants like Cobiah Marriner taught us.
– Cheating is allowed. Shaemoor garrison gates closed and you have to wait? Jump into the water and run around the side, you can make the cut-scene and get out of the tutorial without ever striking a blow.
– Guild Wars 2 is known for its beautiful loading screens. Don’t exit an instance without pulling up the map and waypointing to your next objective.
– Guardians have a speed buff they can unlock on the staff’s third skill. Use it to save entire seconds worth of time.
– The buddy system can save you loads of time. Find someone with a one track mind who likes to load in and run everywhere faster than you, then just sit back and let them start and finish every instance.
– Low level foods are worthless right? Not here my friend. Buy up that Grilled Steak and judge for yourself if you need it.
– Unlock skills, don’t unlock skills, it doesn’t really matter.

Forget not.

After you’ve reached level 10 and received your Black Lion Key, please take the time to sort your inventory. Never forget to return your painstakingly specialized gear to the bank, including the precious Polla as she is unique and impossible to acquire again.

Selling your mountains of acquired loot and salvaged soulbound items can make you 1’s of silver.

And remember the next time you need this character slot, everything left on the character will be destroyed, so collect your things and burn it to the ground.